Aureoles/areolae eggcorn?

[Wilson Gray]

This has been a problem for decades. When I began to do umresearch
upon reaching puberty in the mid-'Forties, I learned "aureole" from my
readings. It was perhaps ten or more years later that I first came
across "areola." By that time, I had studied Latin for about five
years and I decided that "areola" - "a small area" - must be the
"correct" term, as being more descriptive than "'aureole," from a
Latin word that means "golden, gold-colored, gold-plated," etc.

-Wilson

On 8/23/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Aureoles/areolae eggcorn?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Aug 21, 2006, at 11:22 PM, neil crawford wrote:
>
> > Eggcorn?
> >
> > 'Chantal touched both of her purple nipples with her fingers and made
> > circles there. Her aureoles bumped out and her nipples became erect.'
> > --George Pelecanos, 'The Night Gardener', Orion, London, 2006, 211
>
> i have a very clear recollection of a discussion of this one, but can
> find no evidence of it here on ADS-L, and it's not in the eggcorn
> database (even in the comments).  but "aureole" for "areola" is very
> common, and is even listed as a variant spelling in a number of
> dictionaries.  though the words are different in their origins (latin
> AREA for "areola", AURA 'gold' for "aureole"), they end up
> overlapping in meaning, because in their most common usages they
> refer to a disk surrounding something.
>
> what we have here is probably just a word confusion, prompted by
> similarities in both sound and meaning -- like flounder/founder,
> flaunt/flout, militate/mitigate, and adverse/averse, all of which are
> treated in the database either as not eggcorns or as dubious examples
> of the species.
>
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>
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